Augment

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Abstract

The augment is an inflectional verbal prefix associated with past tense and occurring in the indicative of the aorist, imperfect and pluperfect. It is limited in its distribution in the IE family, occurring only in Greek, the Indo-Aryan languages, Iranian, Armenian and Phrygian, suggesting a (late) common innovation in this sub-group. It was in origin an adverb or deictic particle meaning ‘there’ or ‘yonder’, extended metaphorically to refer to d…